Forgiven
K Hanna Korossy
"You ever wonder what people think of us when we show up at 5 a.m. smelling like smoke?" Sam asked as he cut his pancakes into careful fourths and shoveled a stack of syrup-drenched pieces into his mouth.
"No, because I'm not a girl." Dean hadn't bothered to swallow before replying, and Sam grimaced at the glimpse of masticated sausage. Dean's eyes darted up to him, then back to his food with a quirk of the mouth. "Makes sense you would wonder then, though."
Sam glared while he chewed.
Dean pointed his fork at him. "That bitchface you've got going isn't helping your case any, dude."
Sam snorted, stealing a piece of bacon from his brother's plate in revenge.
Dean squawked and shooed him ineffectually away. "Hey, get your own pig."
This from the guy who had the reflexes to skewer Sam's hand with his fork before he could even start pulling it back. Sam gave him a grin but didn't antagonize him further by pointing out what a softie he really was. They both knew Dean would give up his whole breakfast if it would get Sam to eat more.
Not that he was struggling in that department for once. Not like the complete loss of appetite after Jess died, or not wanting to take the time to eat while he searched for a way out of Dean's deal, or the liquid diet—alcohol and demon blood—he'd descended into afterward. No, apparently being soulless meant ravenous hunger—for food and other things—leaving Sam with more muscle mass than he'd ever had before. And thanks to a conscience-clearing jump into Hell to save the world and Death's consequent "Great Wall of Sam" to shield him from the trauma, he was actually feeling better than he had in some time.
Dean rolled his eyes and returned to his meal, one arm now wrapped protectively around his plate.
Sam immediately began plotting angles for a second venture, a sausage link his objective this time.
"Coffee?"
The waitress's terse question brought both their eyes up, and Dean's mug.
The woman, a dishwater blonde at least ten years their senior, slopped a refill into the mug, then strode away without asking if they needed anything else.
Dean looked after her speculatively. "Okay, yeah, you might be right about the smoke thing."
Sam gave him a wry look and speared some more pancake.
The reason they smelled like smoke in the wee hours of the morning was that they were coming off a salt-and-burn. And not your average job: they'd arrived at the grave shortly before midnight to find it had been emptied. Following a trail of disturbed earth and disturbing bits of corpse—clearly the cemetery was not a well-maintained or visited one—they'd found the ghoul responsible hiding out in one of the crypts. Considering the creature now contained the remains of Marilyn Templeton, the ghost who was causing car accidents on a nearby bridge, they'd had to salt and burn it after the usual beheading.
Of course, burning a fresh ghoul wasn't anything like immolating bones. If anything, Sam suspected the two of them smelled like dirt and roasted meat, but this early in the morning, that wasn't really any better. Both waitresses had given them the stink eye since they'd straggled in, sweaty, stained, and starving.
"We could be survivors of a house fire," Sam offered when he finally swallowed.
Dean raised an eyebrow at him. "We'd be rating free food then. All-night barbeque owners," he countered.
"Chimney sweeps."
Dean's mouth twitched. "Firefighters."
Sam shook his head. "Free coffee and pie. Dads of newborns after a really rough night."
Dean choked on his coffee, giving Sam an incredulous look before he grabbed for a napkin. "Doing what, burning the dirty diapers? Making a fire to keep the kid warm?"
The other waitress, tattooed and dark in comparison to their fair, fidgety server, swung by to top Dean's cup off, bumping his arm in the process. Without apology, she swiped her dishrag over the spill and turned away.
"Serial killers burning the evidence," Dean muttered once she was out of earshot.
It was Sam's turn to almost hork pancake down the wrong way.
Dean gave him a sardonic look—yeah, sure he didn't care about what others thought of them—and gulped his steaming coffee. "You know, we were Guttenberg-ing it for a while when you were," a vague wave of the mug, "you know, not you."
He hid his surprise that Dean would even mention anything from his soulless months. As paranoid as his big brother was that any reference to his hidden memories would crack Sam's wall, he'd told Sam only the bare minimum of what he had to know. It was frustrating as, well, Hell, but one reminder of how panicked and ashen Dean had looked after Sam's memory-induced seizure back in Bristol, and he didn't push. He just tried waiting patiently for the bits his brother felt he could share, just as Sam always had for rare memories of their childhood.
Then Dean's words sunk in, and astonishment gave way to confusion.
"Wait, we had a robot?"
Dean looked at him like he'd grown another head. "Dude, 3 Men & a Baby Guttenberg,not Short Circuit Guttenberg! Seriously, that's where your mind goes?"
"Oh." Sam thought for a second, and realized that wasn't a lot less crazy. "We had a baby?"
Dean choked on a laugh. "'Had a baby,'" he repeated. "Maybe you would…"
Sam made a face at him as he mopped up the last of his syrup. It was depressing that they'd hunted long enough that a salt-and-burn left him starving instead of queasy, so he didn't think about it. One more thing in a long list he didn't usually let himself dwell on in fear for his sanity. "Where'd we get a baby from?"
"You have a baby?"
He thought Dean was joking for a second, until a glance up at his brother revealed a genuinely shocked expression. "What? No! You were—"
"Dude, I wouldn't do that." Dean's face had screwed into something a little too close to revulsion. "Wait, this is soulless-you again, isn't it? Screwing your way across the country—you even use protection?"
Sam blinked at him, spectacularly baffled and stunned speechless.
Dean stood from the table as his voice rose. "Oh, God, I can see it. There's a friggin' hole in you where your soul's supposed to be! You're not my brother—where the Hell is Sam?" he demanded.
Panic flushed through him, so different from the adrenalin rush of hunting the ghoul. Sam climbed to his feet too, arms held up, placating. Something was clearly very, very wrong with Dean, and he didn't have a clue as to what or when or how. "Okay, man, take it easy—something's screwing with you, okay? It's me—it's Sam. I'm back—you got me back, remember?"
"What's going on?" a female voice asked behind him, doubtless one of the waitresses. Sam didn't even look her way, just jerked his hand quellingly to the side.
Dean's face hardened; he could have been carved from rock. But Sam was only truly frightened when his brother's mouth twisted into a sneer, because Dean had never looked at him like that, not even at his most furious and betrayed. "Yeah, try saying that again without your eyes going black, you son of a bitch."
Oh, God, he was hallucinating. Sam licked his lips, trying frantically to retrace their evening, what Dean might've been exposed to, what might've gotten to him. Had he ever been out of sight? Could—oh, crap—could he really be a ghoul?
"Yeah, don't have an answer to that, do you?" Dean said with grim satisfaction. And Sam blanched to realize his brother was reaching into the back of his jeans, going for his gun. "Well, I've got one."
He darted a glance around the diner, taking in the dozen or so wait staff and customers who were all watching, frozen, in the line of fire. He couldn't take a chance that Dean would injure one of them, or that one of them would play hero with Dean. This was on Sam.
He went in low and fast.
Dean, whether through impairment or—Sam clung to the hope—doubt and some remaining self-control, didn't react in time. He oofed as Sam's tackle drove the air out of him, and gaped like a beached fish when they hit the floor. But even momentarily incapacitated, Dean's eyes blazed with fury and venom, and Sam knew he only had seconds until his reprieve ended.
He took a breath, murmured an "I'm sorry, man," and clapped his hand over Dean's nose and mouth. Sam was both sickened and relieved his hand was big enough to smother his brother. To choke Dean out.
Dean started struggling, survival mode overcoming his paralysis. He bucked, writhed, rolled, anything to get Sam off him. But Sam outweighed him now by a couple dozen pounds, and he was able to stay on top. All through the long seconds as Dean's wild eyes finally rolled up and closed, and Sam's filled.
He eased off then, gasping like he'd been the one with his air cut off.
"I called 9-1-1."
The wavering voice brought Sam's head up. It was their waitress, shaken now instead of stern.
Behind her stood the other waitress, the tattooed one. But she didn't look scared like her colleague did. In fact, she almost looked like she was…smirking.
Then her eyes flashed blue.
Sam sucked in a breath. Djinn. Dean had said djinn had come after them in revenge, and they could send you into your worst nightmare as well as your fondest wish. There was a cure now, but their poison could act fast and Samuel was dead so Sam would have to find the cure in the journal—
Sam shot up, startling back the blonde waitress with a squeak. "It's okay, I'll take him in. He just had a, uh, drug reaction." He bent over Dean, raising one limp arm, rolling his brother up and over his shoulder. It was a move he knew too well. "He has them sometimes. He'll be all right, thanks. Sorry."
Back on his feet, he stared hard at the djinn, who stared back defiantly. There was no time to deal with her now; Sam stepped back without taking his eyes off her, feeling Dean's arm sway against his back. He didn't stop watching her until they were outside, the diner door slamming shut in his wake. He heard it open again when he was stuffing his brother's boneless body into the car.
She just stood there on the steps. Then raised a hand to cheerfully wave at him.
He was so coming back here later. Might be interesting to see what the antidote did to a djinn. Before he buried lamb's blood-coated silver in her chest.
Besides, Dean hadn't had a chance to order pie.
"All right, gonna get you some help, man. Hang on." Sam slammed the driver's door shut after himself, roared the engine to life, and peeled out of the parking lot.
Dean slid across the seat into him, Sam automatically putting an arm around his shoulders to secure him. He should've revived now from being choked out, but his eyes fluttered open just enough to reveal clouded white beneath the lids. Whatever he was suffering, it wasn't from lack of air.
Sam swallowed. "Hang in there, Dean. We've lost enough family this week."
Dean stayed ominously silent.
Thank God their diner had been close enough to walk, and thank God Dean was too lazy to walk if he could drive. Sam was screeching up to the door within two minutes—two very long, silent, frantic minutes—and he wasn't sure he even closed the car doors after he hauled Dean's limp body out and over his shoulder to carry him inside. He dumped Dean on the first bed and then dove for his brother's duffel.
"All right, all right," he panted as he tore through the journal. "I saw it in here…"
There was the recipe, copied carefully in Dean's block writing before a lengthy section on alphas and the vampire antidote. Scanning it, Sam found with relief that they had all the ingredients, and he dashed toward the door to go raid the Impala's trunk.
That's when Dean's body twitched. Once, twice, then in full-blown seizure.
Sam swore, changing course. "No, no, no, come on," he begged, grabbing onto his brother before he could throw himself off the bed. "Dean, hey, hey." He knew what to do for a seizure: make sure Dean didn't fall off the bed or hit something, monitor breathing, keep him from choking on any vomit. What Sam's training didn't tell him was whether it was more dangerous to leave Dean unattended or delay the antidote a few more minutes. "C'mon, man, don't do this."
A glimpse of Dean's rolling eyes, now completely white, made Sam's decision.
He peeled his hands away from Dean's arched back head, his corded arm. "I'll be right back, okay? Stay with me, Dean." Hesitating, he hoisted the writhing body onto the floor where at least he couldn't fall, then Sam was tearing out of the room.
The agrimony took a little searching, and Sam resolved to reorganize the trunk as soon as they had a little downtime. But soon he had all the ingredients stuffed into his pockets and clenched in his hand, and he rushed back inside.
Dean was lying still. Very still.
Sam didn't even realize he was whispering please, please, please under his breath until he was kneeling on the floor, feeling the soft pulse against his fingers. Weakening but still alive.
Sam dropped his head, blew out a breath. "Too stubborn to quit, huh? Good, that's good, Dean. Just a few more minutes, all right? Gonna get you fixed up."
He pushed to his feet with difficulty, made himself move away to the kitchenette counter.
The antidote was a luminescent white reminiscent of Dean's eyes, and Sam tried to believe that was a good sign, that he'd done everything right. He sucked some up into a clean syringe, made sure there were no air bubbles in it, then returned to the figure lying by the bed.
Dean was shivering, but his skin was translucent and pale, like he was hypothermic. As Sam watched, his mouth parted in an unvoiced moan, then pressed together again, head rolling to the side.
Sam jammed the needle right into the exposed jugular.
There wasn't a reaction for a few seconds. Then Dean's tremors ramped up into shakes, then another seizure, this one even worse.
Sam dropped the needle and hung on to his brother. Straddling the writhing body, he craned for any glimpse of Dean's eyes, trying to see if the white was receding.
"This better be part of the cure, dude." The chiding came out harsh around the lump in his throat. "No more killing family." Not after he'd put a bullet in Samuel, Dean ended Gwen while under the influence, and Bobby did the same with Rufus. There weren't many of them left, and only one Dean. "Don't leave that on me, man."
Blood trickled out of the corner of Dean's mouth. Probably bit his tongue, Sam guessed, and wiped it away with the blade of his hand. But the fear lingered that Dean was suffering…dying.
"C'mon, Dean, you can do this. You got through this a couple times before already, remember? Piece of cake. Just, don't believe whatever you're seeing, okay? Just listen to me. Follow me back, dude."
Dean's head was thumping on the dirty carpet. Sam risked a reach up to the bed for the pillow, jamming it between skull and floor.
"It was a friggin' djinn—can you believe it? Like we haven't got enough breathing down our necks. But we beat 'em before, right? Come on, Dean, get back here so we can go bury the bitch."
Was he maybe calming a little? Sam let his cramped grip go to try to peel back one of Dean's eyelids. He nearly jammed his thumb into Dean's eye instead as his brother jerked, but he caught sight of green. Sam breathed out, finally feeling hope.
"Okay. So, you didn't write down how long this takes to work, but this is good, right? This is progress." Dean was definitely quieting, more spastic twitching than full-on seizing. Sam dared relax his grip and cautiously climb off. He rolled his brother onto his side—recovery position—then pressed fingers in up under his jaw. Heart rate still fast but slowing and strong. Sam took another deep breath. "Great. That's great. Gonna be just fine, dude."
Dean let out a shuddering sigh and went limp, heart pounding away under Sam's fingers. A peek at one eye revealed a normal iris and pupil.
Sam finally slumped back against the wall, dropping his arms onto his drawn-up knees. "So, that was fun." He huffed softly to himself, imagining Dean's acid response.
Rolling his head to the side brought the journal into view, sitting crookedly on the counter a few steps away, and Sam uncoiled enough to crawl over, snag it, and crawl back.
"All right, let's see what else you have on djinns."
Dean hadn't told him much beyond the facts, nor was keen on sharing much of his journal. Not that he put a lot more in there; Dean, unsurprisingly, had always used his journal more for straight reference than as a diary as their dad and Sam had. There were descriptions of the djinn tattoos—which matched the waitress from that morning but also waitresses in a dozen other states, not to mention shop owners, witnesses, and one really weird doctor—and how they could provide fantasies of your fondest wish or your worst nightmare, depending on intent. And there was one terse note about how they could kill with an overdose, as they had Dean and Lisa's next-door neighbors. Sam cocked his head. Reading between the lines, Dean had known the neighbors, and felt guilty about their deaths.
Sam looked up at his brother, shook his head. "Always taking it on yourself, man," he murmured with sad fondness. It was an occupational hazard, one he himself was also certainly prone to, but Dean had always been the one to feel responsible for the whole world. Even when it was his brother who'd nearly doomed it.
Dean gave a residual shiver, eyes still shut and face pinching only for a second before smoothing out.
Sam pushed up again, just enough to reach the cover on Dean's bed, which he pulled down over his brother. Then back against the wall, pressing his aching spine against the stucco—digging up graves only seemed to get more taxing with time, not less—to eye his unconscious—sleeping?—brother.
"Still gotta tell me about that baby, man." He rubbed his hands up his thighs, grimacing when he found a glob of what looked suspiciously like ghoul, or the ghoul's dinner. Sam flicked it aside and thunked his head back. "'Least I can't smell the smoke anymore…"
He jerked when something smacked his leg, blinking with disorientation.
Dean was looking at him, brow furrowed with confused suspicion. "Do I wanna know why we're on the floor?" he said with only a little slurring.
Sam opened his mouth to be amazed that Dean was already awake and alert, only to snap it shut when he realized the shadows had grown long in the room and the sun burned with low late-day haze through the window. He hadn't even realized he'd gone to sleep, but being up all night and then fraternal crisis had obviously taken their toll. Sam reopened his mouth, croaked a sound, then cleared his throat and tried again. "Djinn."
Dean's frown deepened. He began to push himself up, shaking off the hand Sam extended to help. "Here?"
"Diner," Sam corrected. "The waitress."
"Huh." Dean paused, sitting up with the blanket pooled around his waist. "That why I remember you suddenly going soulless and…" He cocked an eyebrow at Sam. "…sowing some Winchester oats?"
No matter how old Sam got, his big brother could still make him blush. "Djinn nightmare," he gritted. "Nice to think me having kids is a nightmare for you."
Dean grunted as he got to his knees, then used the bed for leverage to raise himself enough to plop down on the mattress. "With our bloodline? The angels would probably use the kid for the next Apocalypse."
And wasn't that a cheerful thought? Sam was willing to write it off as a bad mental aftertaste of djinn-poisoned memories, but it still depressed him.
Dean leaned down from the bed to swat at his head. "Just gotta find you the right girl to balance out those Winchester genes. And Robo-you's taste was…" He paused, contemplating. Grinning in a way that suddenly made Sam deeply suspicious. "Okay, he had pretty awesome taste, but for the one-night-stand kinda girl, not the family kind."
Sam was formulating his retort when Dean dropped his head in his hands, silent but tense. "Headache?" he asked quietly instead.
"Like something's trying to dig its way out," Dean answered, voice gravelly.
Sam got up from the floor and moved to the first aid kit he'd raided earlier for a syringe, casting a glance at the bowl of congealed antidote on the counter. "Djinn's still out there."
"You didn't gank it?"
"Kinda had other things on my mind," Sam said sarcastically, finding and uncapping the bottle of Aleve. He tipped three in his hand and got out a glass.
"Wha—? Oh." Dean had raised his head, changed his mind, and dropped it back down. "Crap."
Yeah, oh. "Here." Sam filled the glass with water, then returned to the bed with relief in hand. "Sorry," he offered belatedly.
"Not your fault," Dean muttered, grabbing the glass and chugging it down after the pills. "I'm the one who let a djinn feel me up, again." He sighed, rolling back on the bed, an arm flung over his eyes. "We should go shishkabob her."
"Yeah, maybe when something stops trying to dig through your skull." Sam found another syringe and filled it with a second dose of the antidote. Just in case.
"Whatever." Dean's voice was muffled under his arm. "Djinn bitch…"
"It goes for me, too, you know," Sam blurted before he even realized he'd planned to.
Dean pulled his arm down enough to reveal bloodshot eyes. "I didn't exactly think you were a fan of them," he said slowly.
"No, I mean…" Sam busied himself with the syringe, finding it harder to speak now that he had Dean's full attention. "The blanket forgiveness. It goes for me, too. Whenever it'll be, you know, the real end, no matter what's going on…we're good."
He could feel Dean's eyes, the calculation as his brother tried to figure out what had brought this on.
Sam didn't let his expression slip, just continued packing up the herbs and the first aid kit, capping and setting aside the syringe he'd filled.
Dean lay back, arm again blocking the aggressive rays of the setting sun. "This better not be your way of working toward telling me about a little Sammy somewhere out there."
Sam almost brought up Ben, but he didn't want to sour the mood. Instead, he threw the damp towel with which he'd been wiping the counter, with deadly aim.
Dean cussed him out, tossed it back with far less accuracy, and glared at him until Sam offered to go out for wings and pie and lamb's blood.
But he let Sam pick a Discovery channel documentary to watch while they ate, and Sam knew his message had been received.
The End